So long long ago, in a far away land, I wrote Steamcast, largely to spur server development to new levels. I saw little movement from either SHOUTcast or Icecast with regard to really innovating the space. I was naive however, the code I wrote, while good and very portable was very difficult to maintain. This can be seen by some users issues with crashing and lock ups and my inability to really wade through the spaghetti mess that was Steamcast. The project did serve to do the two things that I wrote it for. To wake up the Icecast2 crew and get them to see there were better ways to make a server (and they responded feverishly in kind to my challenge) and to learn about how servers like SHOUTcast function. For those 2 primary goals Steamcast was a great success. YP protocols were revisited and ways of accomplishing serving media content were invented and created. Oddsock and Karl H were absolutely instrumental in making Icecast what it is today.

Flash forward to 2010 and SHOUTcast responds in kind to their own implementation to the new Ultravox standard and "improving" things in their own YP. I have my own opinions about how they have accomplished their goals and a few of them know them but I will keep them to myself. As they say, "If you have nothing nice to say..."

So with the fresh release of Radio Toolbox 2 behind us, I have been quietly refactoring Steamcast in significant ways. Imagine what I can do now that I know a thing or two about how to code.

So with that said Steamcast is being jump started and it will include some major revisions. It is being completely rewritten from the ground up to take advantage of some of the progresses in the C++ development arena. It also involves refactoring out a lot of poorly implemented code and unsafe C style algorithms. Needless to say this has been a challenging task that I have taken on in my free time. Very, very soon I will be releasing a new version to continue the beta test of my concepts and with hope I will actually make a version 1 release. I think many will like what I am cooking up taking advantage of some of the things I have learned along the way and some of the progresses made with Radio Toolbox v2.

Stage one of development is to get Steamcast back to the feature list that it had in the old code. So focusing on panel management and proper stream management is the primary goal of this project in it's current state. As benefits arise extra features will come, but for the most part the goal will be to make Steamcast do what it does now but with all around better methods.

This will begin the v0.9.8 beta release cycle. Version 1 will be a solidification of the Steamcast standards with regard to where it sits today, just better. So the game is back on. Hope you will join me.

If you would like to watch the progress of Steamcast, you can see a simi-stable Steamcast by going to http://dev.steamcast.com/

Glad to see this development for steamcast - I used to run this for my station back in '05 or '06, good times!
Will you be releasing the source code for the public or inviting people for the beta test?

We will be releasing beta versions of the new Steamcast very soon. Right now we are rigorously testing the system using varying sources on various OS's to catch some remaining bugs and work on making Steamcast more efficient. Tentatively I would like to see a public release of Steamcast Beta this Fall.